cobblestone

There is no illusion or pretending at neutrality: Those shout-outs are unabashed commercials, similar to the sitcom taking a break for commercials. Gruber seems to never mention the product outside of those shout outs. The alternative is someone talking about a great new book they read [BUY NOW] while drinking coffee from their french press [BUY NOW] and how oh their life is different now that they sleep on that new smart mattress [BUY NOW], and the new sous vide cooker is the bee's knees [BUY NOW]...

Elsewhere you talked up the benefits of affiliate links, so I find your whole post somewhat ironic.

Further, it's worth noting that affiliate link blogs almost never make it anywhere on HN, /r/programming, or elsewhere. They generally exist on the fringe, existing on the meager search engine traffic, capturing the accidental visitor. Actual empirical reality seems to counter your claims. The only blog of any consequence that actually lowers itself to affiliate links is Marco Arment, and thankfully he confines that to standalone "review" type posts.

If the income is so low and irrelevant, why are the links there in the first place. Why even put a question mark on it when it's just entirely unnecessary? I fairly prolifically blog, and I haven't put a single affiliate link in a post since it was a novelty in the mid-90s, because to do so takes advantage of readers and undermines credibility.

And to your root claim, I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous. I've come across blogs reviewing and recommending books that they clearly had never read, at most skimming a short ways in. Most technical books are absolutely horrendous (I understand you cite yourself as an author, almost surely motivating your down arrow), so this completely short circuits the equation.

I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past.

It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories. I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip past, and that's that.

And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly, horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.

Probably the least offputting, brand-ruining tactic is the Daring Fireball technique of periodically putting some shout out to a sponsor and encouragement of their product. I suspect it is far more rewarding both to him and his sponsors, and limits the sliminess to a single occasional post, versus selling one's credibility.

ITT - people pitching affiliate links and crapware on their tiny blogs talk up how great it is.

What boyfriend would be put off by that?

My worst experiences encountering other people's code have been the code that followed the best practices, and defensively shielded itself from criticism. Layers of interfaces and injections and abstractions and separation of concerns yielding hundreds to hundreds of thousands of artifacts for the simplest task, always sold on the notion that it was ready for the future, but in reality would never be adapted to the future.

One of those $100 Intel-powered Android tablets with the Z3745 processors has a processor that, core for core, equals a Pentium III or better. But instead of one core, it has four of them. And dramatically higher memory bandwidth. And SIMD. And a GPU. And shockingly fast flash storage.

And it's probably running at least a 1280x720 screen, though some options obviously go dramatically higher.

In ~2000, when these sorts of specs were common, we did all of our office work, software development, etc, on much less power.